FEATURE
Northern Manitoba is home to some of the province’s
most precious natural resources.
Perhaps no one of those resources is more appreciated
or more admired than the stunning and unspoiled
territory that makes up the region, home to thousands of kilometres
of pristine land. One of the crown jewels of the province’s
north is Bakers Narrows Provincial Park. Located just south of Flin
Flon, it’s comprised of 350 acres of stunning Precambrian boreal
forest on the shores of scenic Lake Athapapuskow. It’s a popular
destination for fishers looking to hook trout or walleye and nature
lovers hoping to catch a glance of moose or beavers who call the
park home.
Swan River-based Dee’s Electric co-owners Blair Delaurier and
David Collinge had an opportunity to admire the park’s natural
beauty this past winter. Their company was hired to install a series
of electrical upgrades at Bakers Narrows in December.
The bulk of the project was providing a new electrical supply to
an old office building and cold storage facility located in the park.
Over the years, the requirements for the building had changed and
the existing electrical supply could no longer meet the demands
placed on it, says Delaurier.
“They had just maxed out their old service,” he said. “It looked
like they added on too much over the years. They had no more
(capacity). They needed more amperage to be able to hook up
more stuff.”
As part of the work they performed, Delaurier and Collinge
installed a completely new electrical supply to both the office space
and cold storage portion of the building. Each section of the facility
is now capable of receiving its own supply of up to 200 amps. To do
that, they first had to kill the old main service to the building, then
work the old feeder out and cut it off flush with the surface since
the ground was too frozen to dig up. They then had to run about
80 metres of new ACWU wire to the building and connect a new
meter mast and socket. The final step was connecting the wires to
the existing electrical panel in the building.
The work Delaurier and his partner performed doubled the
amount of electricity supplied to the building and will allow park
staff to expand the operation of the building in future years.
“In the past, they probably would have been nervous running
a couple of appliances together at the same time,” Delaurier
said, laughing.
The most challenging aspect of the project for Delaurier and
Collinge was dealing with the elements. There was more than three
feet of snow on the ground at the time they performed the upgrade,
and they had to shovel around the outside of the building to access
its base and feed the new wiring into the structure. The frozen
ground further complicated things.
Due to the nature of the work, Dee’s Electric’s co-owners had
to coordinate everything with Manitoba Hydro and draw up a diagram
of their plans in advance to ensure there were no hiccups.
“A project like that requires a lot of coordination with Hydro,”
Delaurier said. “The Hydro inspectors that were coming out for us
at the time were coming out of Winnipeg. We had to plan it so they
were all up in the same area at the same time. Anything with Hydro
generally takes a lot of coordination to make sure we’re all on the
same page.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF LAKEATHAPAP / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / CC-BY-SA-3.0
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